When was snapchat invented

And maybe it's even a little addictive. But that's not what Snapchat does best--nor is it what caused the app to take off initially, according to sources who study and observe its use. In , when Stanford grads Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy launched Snapchat, user-adoption was slow, but students at a few California grade schools began downloading it as a very convenient work-around for communicating.

Firstly, it allowed them to send messages, in photos and writing, away from the eyes of parents and teachers but, heck, this secrecy is the same reason Snapchat is allegedly blowing up on Wall Street. Second, it works over Wi-Fi, so sending messages doesn't deplete the family's data plan, as does texting. Third, the app works on devices that aren't smartphones--so teens who don't yet have phones could also join the messaging fun.

A New York Times overview story about Snapchat contained a telling nugget about how the app's use spread--starting with a Southern California high school. Spiegel and Mr. Murphy shared an updated version for the iPhone with about 20 friends in September A few weeks in, they started seeing an influx of new users, paired with unusual spikes in activity, peaking between 8 a.

It turned out the activity was centered around a high school in Orange County. Spiegel's mother had told his cousin, who was a student at the school, about the app, which then spread throughout the school. Want to show off what you're doing to your crush without sending it to them directly?

Just post it to your story and see if the view comes in. No "liking" required. Snap then came up with the idea of making stories more communal — and not just limited to friends — with the innovation of Our Story. At first, just based on location, you could contribute to your city's story.

It felt like a revelation to see what people were doing in cities from Mumbai to Sao Paolo in near real time. Today there are still geographical stories, but there are also user-generated stories for events, around cultural themes, holidays, and more.

After taking a little while to catch on, Snapchat stories were all the rage for, basically, the year But Snap was about to pay the piper for reportedly turning down Mark Zuckerberg's acquisition offer: Facebook-owned Instagram just copied Stories outright. Other companies, including Twitter, LinkedIn, and more would copy the stories format in the following years.

Snapchat needed to make a change, and not just because Instagram was stealing its ideas. It needed to start making money. So in , it unveiled a major redesign of the app that introduced algorithmic content feeds for public content published by media companies or in Our Stories based on interest. In one quarter, Snap lost 3 million users. Someone even started a Change. Growth stabilized by , but The Redesign still strikes fear into the heart of Snapchat users the world over.

That word, in all caps, was one of the first Snapchat filters. That's it. And yet using it was novel, fun… funny!?

Snapchat launched filters that were geo-gated, and location-based filters One of the first location filters was the appearance of raining money in Las Vegas. That basic idea morphed into AR filters , with the cute dog and barfing rainbows faces that launched a thousand selfies and Instagram copycats. Now, with a "creator studio" that lets anyone with technical and artistic know how make lenses, it's a central part of the company's business. The ability to change your face with AR led to racially insensitive filters.

For instance, a Bob Marley filter essentially put users in black face, and some described another filter that gave users caricature-ish flat, slanted eyes as a form of "yellow face. That bad judgement has been linked to problems with diversity and a "whitewashed" culture at Snapchat, as one former employee put it: In , Mashable published an account of racial bias on the team in charge of curating Stories from Snapchat conducted an investigation and concluded that the reported issues did not constitute a "widespread pattern.

With the rise of Oculus, rumors continuing to circulate about a mixed reality Apple headset , and the debut of Facebook's new Ray Ban smart glasses , there's a renewed spotlight on the potential of smart glasses. They would need to recruit one of their friends to join them. They started a list of their fraternity brothers who had taken computer science courses. Most of the seniors that year were still economics majors heading off to Wall Street and the major consulting shops after graduation — it would be a few more years until most sought to make their fortunes in the Valley.

But they came up with a couple names and headed off to the fraternity to recruit them. Evan was a particularly persuasive salesman but he struggled to convince people with the initial pitches. The first two fraternity brothers he invited to join them said no.

Fortunately, Evan was not so easily deterred. And he had the perfect person in mind — his old Future Freshman cofounder, Bobby. Evan was sure he could convince Bobby to work on the app. Would people really want to use this? Evan nervously urged him that this idea was different from anything other people were working on.

They had learned a lot from their past two projects, and this was the most unique idea yet. Bobby, at last convinced, agreed to write the code, hoping the third time would be the charm for him and Evan.

They quickly realized it would be much easier and more private for users, and thus more widely used, if they built a mobile app instead of a website; to this day, Snapchat still does not offer a web product. They sat around in their dorm room, debating how users should interact with their friends and what features would make people tell their friends to download it. Evan ran the group, making sure things were coming together on time and keeping everyone focused, while boisterous Reggie offered up ideas on all the different ways people would use the app.

Bobby put in eighteen-hour coding days for the next week to get them to a working prototype. Reggie came up with a name for the app: Picaboo, a riff on the childhood game Peek-a-boo.

They finished a working prototype of Picaboo just days before final exams. They needed people to download the app, test it out, and hopefully tell their friends about it. Evan decided to approach his former fraternity brothers; despite having been kicked out, he was still friendly with most of the guys from his year, and they were still some of the most social people on campus.

Evan needed the popular crowd to use this if it was going to catch on. Evan quickly typed out a few lines about the app. He had told a lot of the guys about the idea before but not in such a broad, public way.

He imagined people forwarding the email, downloading the app, and being instantly addicted. Facebook had launched a mere seven years earlier and ripped through Harvard like wildfire before spreading to other campuses, and then the world. The Stanford Daily wrote at the time about how many students were skipping classes because they were consumed with Facebook. Instagram had been downloaded over forty thousand times on the day of its initial release.

Evan used an analytics platform called Flurry to track how many people downloaded the app, how often they used it, and how often they sent pictures to each other.

It was time for the world to see Picaboo.